A far cry from teaching the immediate post-mortem torture of the wicked, the Bible, though it is most explicit in the Old Testament (passages like John 14:1-3 nonetheless require soul sleep or something similar to not contradict themselves [1]), says over and over that all people enter a state of unconsciousness or sleep upon biological death. They do not depart the living to go to anything remotely similar to Valhalla or Helheim or the popular but enormous misconceptions of the Christian heaven or hell. After all, this would mean they are still alive at least on the level of consciousness and, if they have a placeholder/replacement body, they would be biologically alive too, albeit in a different sense than those on Earth. In teaching something that is largely unique among common religions, the Christian afterlife is all the more unlike those of paganism.
The dead are wholly, genuinely dead according to the Bible. Verses like Leviticus 20:27 and Deuteronomy 18:9-11, in condemning all sorcery and necromancy, might in part declare these practices immoral because the dead are not conscious as they are on various forms of paganism. Either they can only be brought back to consciousness by means of using magic or demons might be impersonating them, or the fact that on the Christian worldview necromancy could only otherwise be an empty pursuit is the reason it is immoral (it would not be grounded in truth because the dead know nothing). Apart from such uses of magic, which are sinful for humans, the dead will not be conscious again until their resurrection as already addressed.
The story of the witch of Endor conjuring the spirit of Samuel in 1 Samuel 28 touches upon how the only way for a person to revive the spirits of the dead would be to resort to supernatural power, for the dead are dead; they are unaware until their resurrection. All of this makes Judeo-Christianity even more different from paganism, including the distortions of Christianity marred by pagan philosophical additions. Dead people are not in torment or bliss. Moreover, once they are restored to life (Job 14:10-15, Psalm 16:10, Isaiah 26:19, 1 Thessalonians 4:13-8, Revelation 20:6, 11-15, and so on), there is no eternal consciousness for the wicked (Ezekiel 18:4, Matthew 10:28, John 3:16, Romans 6:23, and so on). They eventually come to an end, as would already be necessitated according to the wording of the aforementioned Daniel 12:2 since it contrasts the fate of the righteous and wicked while saying the righteous have eternal life.
There are many differences between Judeo-Christianity and miscellaneous pagan philosophies. Some of the latter feature humanoid, killable "gods" and "goddesses" with physical bodies that are not uncaused causes (like the Olympians), misogyny or misandry, wildly diverging moral duties from those of the Torah, nature worship, and so on. With the afterlife, it is not just the nature and/or duration of the afterlives in Biblical theology that differ from those of paganism, but the very timing of the afterlife altogether: the Bible teaches that the afterlife is delayed until one's resurrection, short of atypical, supernatural intervention like the witch of Endor's. The dead think nothing, feel nothing, and do nothing. This is not what many forms of paganism and many shallow Christians hold to.
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